Daily Archives: January 20, 2019

It’s going to be a cold one tomorrow! Don’t forget to send in your child’s labeled winter gear to school and remind them to put on the snow pants for recess. Also, wash those hands!!! We’ve had some yucky viruses spreading around school. Winter is back!!!

January 21 – Library Day

January 21 – MLK Jr. Day

January 21 – Happy Birthday Liv!!!

January 25 – Popcorn Day

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner! If your child is eager to get to work on his/her valentines, I will be sending an e-mail later this week with our class list. :)

Reading:

This week in reading, we focused in on habits of a good reader to become SUPER SMART about NONFICTION topics. We worked at finding nonfiction books that are at a level we can read most of the words and then practiced taking a sneak peek to see what we could learn about the topic, before we even read the words.

We worked hard to s-l-o-w down our reading and really pay close attention to each page and the words and pictures that help teach us. We used what we learned from one page to help us predict what else we might learn in the book. And, we spent a lot of time sharing what we had learned (in our own words).

Writing:

This week in Writers Workshop, we started a new unit about Nonfiction Writing. We are just at the beginning of the unit but we have already learned so much! First graders are so excited to be teaching about topics that they know a lot about! We began the week by talking about when you write a Nonfiction book, you need to pick a topic that you are an expert about. The way that we do this is first to think of a topic that you know a lot about. Then you plan your pages across your fingers. We want to make sure that we know around 5 facts about our topic so that we can write those facts across our pages in our books.

After you plan your topic across your fingers, good teachers and writers quickly sketch their plan across the pages in their books so that they don’t forget what they want to write on that page! Once you have sketched you plan then it is time to write the words!

Math:

This week, we introduced our first graders to a new addition strategy called “Make a 10″. For the equation, 9 + 4 = ___, we can “count on” to find the total of 13. Since the total, 13, is a teen number (which has a 10 hiding inside) we helped our students notice that 9 + 4 = 10 + 3. Both of these equations produce the total 13, but solving 10 + 3 is quicker and more accurate.

We will spend much of our math time next week working with this new strategy, as it is still very new and fragile.